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Acrylics Anonymous, Issue #073 -- Wave Said It Before And Whale Say It Again July 01, 2018 |
Passionate about painting with acrylics? Need a monthly fix chock full of inspiration? Need some help to take the pain out of your painting process? It's all here for you. Acrylics Anonymous. Zero elitism. Dive in. If you enjoy Acrylics Anonymous, and you know someone who might also enjoy it, you can share by forwarding it to your friends! If you are receiving this because a friend has forwarded this to you, and you would like to subscribe, click here! 
Every month, we will produce a Subscribers Only "sealed section". It could be a painting technique, a short video tip, or anything we can think of that we reckon you might enjoy. Please let us know what you think, we love your feedback! To leave comments, contact us here.
Allow Room For Error One of the traps with painting is to get too serious about it. Getting all caught up in the outcome means we sometimes forget how to have fun with it along the way. A good way to overcome this is to have a second canvas (a practise canvas) that you experiment and work on different parts of the painting on. You can even do the same painting on two canvases - this is a great way to allow yourself to make mistakes and enjoy the process. It fully takes the pressure off, and you’ll probably find your practise canvas has a quality about it that your “proper” painting doesn’t. Win! 
Sitemap Schmitemap Remember the site map is there for you to use! You'll find heaps of information you didn't even know existed! To find the sitemap, click here.
Blub blub blub! Seen our page on underwater painting? Check it out for some great tips on creating the illusion of depth and distance in your underwater paintings. Click here for some underwater inspiration. 
Every month, we choose an Artist from our
forum
to showcase. You can even nominate someone if you like. (Or yourself!). To do this, check out the forum and then send us an email! It’s that easy. This month we're featuring Allesha Martinson, from British Columbia, Canada, with her painting interestingly titled "The Big Brown Smear". A great story about how an experiment turned into a great painting. Thanks so much for sharing! Click here to read Allesha's story about The Big Brown Smear
Now, we don’t have any affiliation with this company, AND it is about oil paints. BUT, here at explore acrylics HQ, we love colour, and we also love seeing how paint is made. So check out this video for a beautiful insight into their process for creating gorgeous oil paints. Glorious pigments and gloopy gorgeousness right here. The talent of 11 year old Nigerian artist Kareem Waris is just extraordinary. Check it out here: Have a look at this amazing artist and his works. If you have a link you like, please share it with us! You can contact us to let us know. Thank you! 
This is the section where you can "get your name in lights!" (well at least out there in the internet world!).If you have works in progress you would love to show off, or finished pieces you are particularly proud of, we would love to see them! We especially like to hear about the story behind the creation. This month's story comes once again from our very own Mark Waller. Mark is all lit up about his recent trip to the Solomon Islands and wanted to share this painting's process and progress with you. From Mark: Standing on this beach in the Solomon Islands, in front of a storm, watching the greys gradually deepen and the light change, was awe inspiring - and makes you feel small in a very big environment. The captivating thing was though, that as the light changed, the colours of the reef in no way diminished. Sometimes the colours seem almost unnatural, and it’s like someone has enhanced and exaggerated the colours in the image somehow. The colours are just extraordinary, such that even a simple scene like a sand bank in front of a storm, is laden with colour and drama. Every now and then a painting doesn’t make it to “finished” because an image grabs me, and a canvas I have allocated for something else becomes a “victim” - collateral damage :) I was so excited to paint this after coming back from the Solomons, that I blocked in the bones really quickly just to get the sense of the image down. Sometimes a painting grabs you instantly, and from that point on, you’re at it’s whim - almost like a medium of some sort.
One of the first things I did was establish the greys and those lovely turquoises, because they are fundamentally what the painting is about. When I was happy with how bright they were, and where they were, I started refining and tidying up the picture, alternating between working on the sky area and the water, allowing for drying times and to give myself a break from certain parts that weren’t behaving.
There are some parts of a painting which for me anyway, require to be done in a very particular way, and other parts which I’m happy to allow to be “less” controlled. Sometimes those “controlled” areas may be only small parts of the painting, but they are the parts that demand the most attention - and get it! In this case, I really wanted to get the horizon correct, and the colours needed to work as well. There were some very subtle shifts in hue and tone along both edges of the horizon. There were also some lovely broken areas in the clouds which needed to be represented (to my mind anyway) in a particular way.
As usual with acrylics, drying time was an issue, so there was some wrestling with keeping wet edges, and paint “open” enough to be moved for long periods. It’s a challenge painting a sky with this many levels of complexity with acrylics, and I was tempted to do it with oils. But I’m a stubborn old goat, and refused to be beaten by it. Hahahaha. It somehow makes the finished painting much more satisfying I reckon.
I started adding a little more detail into the reef, and spent quite a bit of time getting those turquoises right. It was a week or so since I was there (in the Solomons) but those colours are etched in my memory. I wasn’t quite happy with the sand area, and I really wanted to get more of that turquoise in. So the sand bank got edited :) And this is the result. What do you think? Thanks so much Mark for sharing this gloriousness with us! To check out Mark's (other) website, click here. And his instagram here. And his facebook page here. Hope you enjoyed this issue of Acrylics Anonymous! If you have any suggestions, comments or feedback for the ezine or our site, please don't hesitate to contact us. Until next time, make sure you chuck some paint around! Cheers from Frankie & Mark :) |
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